So here’s the deal: I’m a godless, soulless, technocratic transhumanist. Comments I’ve made in previous posts may have hinted at my love for technology. I like fantasy fine, yeah. It’d double coded, magic is all wonderful; I love World of Warcraft. All these things are fine.

Ultimately, though, my love has been for science fiction since I was a wee tot. Heinlein, Aasimov, Clarke, Stephenson, Gibson … these are the folks that I think of when I go to my happy reading place. As has been noted many times by NPD sales, developers, and money-men, I’m in the minority. Apparently the idea of surgically implanting a stainless steel port into your skull, in order more easily connect with a computer, is something not everyone enjoys. In space no one can hear you scream, and it’s hard to love a robot.

I’m tired of it. The Sci-fi ‘niche’ is a fantastic venue for creative thinking, and it’s an incredibly evocative milieu for gaming. Here are my five reasons why science fiction makes for a better setting than fantasy …

Update: Welcome io9 readers! Make sure to check out Grimwell’s fantasy-oriented response to this post, and my podcast followup to get the full discussion.

Read more

My schedule is going to be crazy this year, so I’m not even going to try to nail down what all I’m going to be attending right now. Just the same, I’ve assembled a list of the MMOG events at the Game Developers Conference this year, for your convenience.

Not listed below the cut is anything at the Worlds in Motion Summit, which is nothing but MMO/VW stuff. It’s all good! Go see the whole thing! I’m biased, though: I’ll be moderating an event on Tuesday there. Also not on the list because it’s not MMO-related directly is Damion Shcubert’s ‘Great Design Docs’ talk, now in its second showing. It’s well worth seeing if you have a second on Friday.

I do want to point out one big one, a very-much-must-see event:

Future of MMOs
Speaker: Mark Jacobs (VP EA, Studio GM EA Mythic, EA Mythic), Rob Pardo (VP, Game Design, Blizzard Entertainment), Jack Emmert (Chief Creative Officer, Cryptic Studios), Ray Muzyka (CEO, BioWare Corp.), Min Kim (Director of Game Operations, Nexon America Inc.)
Date/Time: Thursday (February 21, 2008) 12:00pm — 1:00pm
Location (room): Room 135, North Hall

Jacobs, Pardo, Emmert, Muzyka, and Kim all on one ticket? There won’t be an empty chair in the place! Go get in line now! The complete list of GDC MMO events is below.

Read more

A gent I’m pleased to consider a friend has done a wonderful thing, and I want to make sure you know about it. Brent has released his hundredth episode of the VirginWorlds podcast, and it is a glorious thing.

Clocking in at just under 3 hours in length, show 100 has finally arrived.  There are probably 30+ familiar voices on this show and you’ll find plenty of raw commentary and information as well as more laughs than any other episode of the VirginWorlds Podcast. Special thanks to ALL of the contributors to this special 100th episode.  It has been a great run and there WILL be 100 more podcasts from VirginWorlds!

The beginning, at the least, is worth listening to. Jonathan (of various VW podcasts) has a great skit put together at the start of the show … and it’s darn funny. Like, LOL funny. Check it out for sure.

Congratulations, Brent. Here’s to 100 more.

Joystiq and Massively are cross-posting a piece I wrote up on The Agency, one of the two darlings of SOE’s hotel suite at CES. Basically the idea was that everyone had already seen the video and such by the time we’d already got back. So I took the audio from a chat Chris Grant and Barb Dybwad did with the devs + the one I and Dan O’Halloran had, and I diffed between the three sources of information. The result is what you see at the site.

Some of the most interesting tidbits the developers were willing to discuss that day weren’t on the guided tour. Lead Designer Hal Milton and Design Director Matt Wilson were willing and able to discuss several aspects of the project still in the development stages with us and our friends at Massively; we were able to pick their brains on the game’s business model, the fantastic world they’re creating, character advancement, future content additions, and the numerous challenges of creating a game that straddles two platforms.

Because it’s all informational, there’s no real room for me to include my opinion of the game in there. That’s what this place is for. To put a point on it: The Agency is my new ‘game of the future’. Since I started digging on these games back in the day I’ve always had some game or another to look forward to, a game to keep me enthusiastically reading sites like Lum the Mad back in the day. The period I remember most vividly with ‘future games’ was the time early in my post-college working period where SWG and WoW were both in-development. I spent endless lunch hours pining for those games, looking forward to their release. I read every update, every piece of information, every dev blog … it was a good time. Over 2007 I spent much of the year looking forward to Warhammer Online, and now the launch of the greenskins is fast approaching.

So, I need a new star on the horizon. The Agency has definitely stepped up. Sitting and listening to Hal Milton do his thing is inspiring. He and Matt Wilson are so obviously smart, so obviously ‘getting’ what it is that they need to do in order to make this game a success, that it’s fun just to watch them expound. If The Agency fails, it’s not going to be because of a lack of courage, or because of a lack of good ideas. And in fact, the game is showing signs of being one of the biggest sure-fire successes SOE has ever done. Already a solid play experience (apparently) in a Pre-alpha state, the team plans on having their featureset frozen by the time they leave alpha. This means the Beta phase will be nothing but iterating on content, getting the polish right. IE: just what everyone has been saying since Blizzard’s game released.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the controls of this game. Just watching the video was inspiring. It’s great … fantastic even … to feel this way about a game again. The Agency looks like it’s more than just a breath of fresh air’ or ‘new paint’, but a fundamentally different way to play with my friends in a MMOG.

Here’s hoping their efforts bear the variety of fruit they’re reaching so far out on that limb to grab.

I got to sit in on the first episode of a new VW show. That was kinda cool. Witty Ranter is going for a ‘Shut Up We’re Talking, with Swearing’ vibe. It was, as always, fun sitting with a bunch of fun guys and shooting the shit.

Here’s the description of the show:

In his inaugural debut to the VirginWorlds Collective, Adam gets Brenden from AnotherHere, Michael Edwards, a MMO game developer, Michael Zenke from Massively.com and Jonathan from The Online Gamer’s Anthology together for a discussion.  Topics include “Crafting in MMO’s:  It really need to die.  No, we mean it!”, and “Is there anything in 2008 for us to look forward to?”… Oh yeah, and true to form, we get a Zenke Rant…  Aww yeah.  This show does contain explicit language.  Viewer Discretion Advised. 

I gotta say, though, and I apologize to my fellow co-hosts for this: I’m not sure I really felt the topics this time around. While I personally don’t get into crafting, I don’t really understand the point of ‘it has to die’. What did crafting ever do to you? Then in the discussion of this year, there was a lot of cynical jadery flung around. I’m looking forward to WAR and Conan quite a bit - 2008 has a lot to offer.

I had a great time, and I don’t want to belittle the opinions of others at all. I just want to clarify: I’m not sure we said a whole lot in the hour we chatted. It’s still fun, just the same. Check it out. :)

My very favorite monster hunter is Van Hemlock. He’s a man I’ve always pictured wearing leather armor and a flowing cloak, with a jaunty cap and goggles atop his head.

I mention this because I hope it’s public knowledge that I kind of have the man-love for his writing. Whether he’s exploring game trials, practicing in the rockpool, putting the steathy-stab into a hero, or (most famously) walking the length and breadth of Arena.net’s lands, it’s been a pleasure to read his work.

So the news that he’s taking some time away from the internets was somewhat saddening for me.

As mentioned previously, my own Real Life has gotten a bit busier over the last few months, and time is starting to be squeezed a bit for me. Sleep and Work have to stay, unfortunately, leaving only the blogging, the reading of other peoples blogs, and the gaming itself. Without the gaming, I’d have nothing to blog about, so I’m taking a few months off of being Van Hemlock. The old blogging batteries are starting to fade somewhat of late anyway, and with the wrapping up of my big Guild Wars Adventure, this seems like an ideal time to have a bit of a holiday from blogging.

I totally understand where you’re coming from, of course, sir. I hope that your rest period is productive in other areas, and that your promised return to our chattering byways and waterways happens soon thereafter. Good luck, and good health.

I’ve really been enjoying io9, a new gawker blog all about the sci that is fi. I dunno what super-Spaarti chambers those bloggers were grown in, but almost every post they put up there is a must-read. If you enjoy the genre known as ’speculative fiction’ I highly recommend it.

One of their recent posts resonated a lot with me because of some of the media I’ve been consuming lately. An article entitled Eight Reasons the Heroes Journey Sucks runs down some of the weakest components of that well-worn story path.

I particularly agree with this point:

It discourages originality. If you claim that every great story is really just the same great story with surface changes, you’re encouraging people to plagiarize the hell out of old stories. Instead of championing stories that are different, like say, Firefly/Serenity or James Robinson’s Starman, you’re tempted to call a schlock-fest like the original Star Wars “mythic” because it’s about a hero who’s singled out.

Read more